Saturday, October 27, 2012

Omar Saad, a young (Druze) Palestinian musician from the Galilee village of al-Mughar has received a summon to the Israeli enlistment army. The Druze citizens of Israel are forced to enlist in the Israeli military, since 1956, when conscription law applied to Druze men (not to other Palestinians). Recent studies show that two thirds of Druze youth would not enlist in the Israeli military if given the choice, read more here.

Omar is one of the many Druze youth who refuse to serve in the Israeli military, in his letter below (which I translated from Arabic), he says it all:

To the Israeli Prime Minister, To the “Defense Minister”,

Subject: refusal to appear for compulsory military recruitment.

I’m the undersigned, Omar Zahr Eldin Mohammad Saad from the village of Mughar – Galilee, have received a notice to appear in the military recruitment offices on 31.10.2012 to conduct tests according to the conscription law imposed on the Druze community. I would like to make the following points:

I refuse to appear for tests, because I oppose the law of conscription imposed on my Druze community. I refuse because I am a man of peace and I hate all forms of violence, and the military institution represents for me the peak of physical and psychological violence.

Since I received the notice to appear for tests, my life has changed, I became more nervous, my thoughts were distracted, I remembered thousands of cruel images, and I couldn’t imagine myself wearing military uniform and participating in the suppression of my Palestinian people or fighting my Arab brothers. I oppose the recruitment to the Israeli military and any other military for conscience and nationalistic reasons. I hate the injustice and oppose the occupation; I hate intolerance and restriction of freedoms. I hate those who detain children, the elderly and women.

I am a musician, I play the Viola , I have played in many places, I have musician friends from Ramallah, Jericho, Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus, Jenin, Shfa’amr, Eilabun, Rome, Athens, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, Oslo, and we all play for freedom, humanity and peace, our weapon is the music and we shall not have any other weapon. I am from a community that was unjustly treated by an unjust law, how can we fight our relatives in Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon? How can I hold arms against my brothers and people in Palestine? How can I be a soldier standing at Qalandia checkpoint or any other checkpoint, after I experienced the injustices at these checkpoints?

How can I prevent someone from Ramallah to visit his city, Jerusalem? How can I guard the apartheid wall? How can I be a jailer to my own people while I know that the majority of prisoners are freedom prisoners and seekers of rights and freedom?

I play for joy, for freedom, for a just peace based on halting settlements, the end of the occupation in Palestine, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem its capital, the release of all prisoners in prisons and the return of displaced refugees to their homes.

Many of the youth from my community have done the compulsory service in the army, what have we received? Discrimination in all areas, our villages are the poorest, our lands were confiscated, there are no master plans, and no industrial zones. Percentages of university graduates in our villages of the lowest in the region, the unemployment rates in our villages are the highest. This mandatory law has kept us away from our Arab connection.

This year, I will finish high school, and I seek to complete my university education. I’m sure you will try to make me concede my human ambition, but I announce it loudly:

I, Omar Zahr Eldin Mohammad Saad, will not be the fuel to the fire of your war, and will not be a soldier in your army .

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Just when you thought you heard it all and it couldn't get any worse, you get confirmation of what we have been saying all along. This is one time I wish I had been dead wrong.

"The survey indicates that a third to half of Jewish Israelis want to live in a state that practices formal, open discrimination against its Arab citizens. An even larger majority wants to live in an apartheid state if Israel annexes the territories."

Civil rights struggle, here we come,

Sam

---

Haaretz

Survey: Most Israeli Jews would support apartheid regime in Israel

Gideon Levy

October 23, 2012

Most of the Jewish public in Israel supports the establishment of an apartheid regime in Israel if it formally annexes the West Bank. A majority also explicitly favors discrimination against the state's Arab citizens, a survey shows.

The survey, conducted by Dialog on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, exposes anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist views espoused by a majority of Israeli Jews. The survey was commissioned by the Yisraela Goldblum Fund and is based on a sample of 503 interviewees.

The questions were written by a group of academia-based peace and civil rights activists. Dialog is headed by Tel Aviv University Prof. Camil Fuchs.

The majority of the Jewish public, 59 percent, wants preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries. Almost half the Jews, 49 percent, want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones; 42 percent don't want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don't want their children in the same class with Arab children.

A third of the Jewish public wants a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset and a large majority of 69 percent objects to giving 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank.

A sweeping 74 percent majority is in favor of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. A quarter - 24 percent - believe separate roads are "a good situation" and 50 percent believe they are "a necessary situation."

Almost half - 47 percent - want part of Israel's Arab population to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority and 36 percent support transferring some of the Arab towns from Israel to the PA, in exchange for keeping some of the West Bank settlements.

Although the territories have not been annexed, most of the Jewish public (58 percent ) already believes Israel practices apartheid against Arabs. Only 31 percent think such a system is not in force here. Over a third (38 percent ) of the Jewish public wants Israel to annex the territories with settlements on them, while 48 percent object.

The survey distinguishes among the various communities in Israeli society - secular, observant, religious, ultra-Orthodox and former Soviet immigrants. The ultra-Orthodox, in contrast to those who described themselves as religious or observant, hold the most extreme positions against the Palestinians. An overwhelming majority (83 percent ) of Haredim are in favor of segregated roads and 71 percent are in favor of transfer.

The ultra-Orthodox are also the most anti-Arab group - 70 percent of them support legally barring Israeli Arabs from voting, 82 percent support preferential treatment from the state toward Jews, and 95 percent are in favor of discrimination against Arabs in admission to workplaces.

The group classifying itself as religious is the second most anti-Arab. New immigrants from former Soviet states are closer in their views of the Palestinians to secular Israelis, and are far less radical than the religious and Haredi groups. However, the number of people who answered "don't know" in the "Russian" community was higher than in any other.

The Russians register the highest rate of satisfaction with life in Israel (77 percent ) and the secular Israelis the lowest - only 63 percent. On average, 69 percent of Israelis are satisfied with life in Israel.

Secular Israelis appear to be the least racist - 68 percent of them would not mind having Arab neighbors in their apartment building, 73 percent would not mind Arab students in their children's class and 50 percent believe Arabs should not be discriminated against in admission to workplaces.

The survey indicates that a third to half of Jewish Israelis want to live in a state that practices formal, open discrimination against its Arab citizens. An even larger majority wants to live in an apartheid state if Israel annexes the territories.

The survey conductors say perhaps the term "apartheid" was not clear enough to some interviewees. However, the interviewees did not object strongly to describing Israel's character as "apartheid" already today, without annexing the territories. Only 31 percent objected to calling Israel an "apartheid state" and said "there's no apartheid at all."

In contrast, 39 percent believe apartheid is practiced "in a few fields"; 19 percent believe "there's apartheid in many fields" and 11 percent do not know.

The "Russians," as the survey calls them, display the most objection to classifying their new country as an apartheid state. A third of them - 35 percent - believe Israel practices no apartheid at all, compared to 28 percent of the secular and ultra-Orthodox communities, 27 percent of the religious and 30 percent of the observant Jews who hold that view. Altogether, 58 percent of all the groups believe Israel practices apartheid "in a few fields" or "in many fields," while 11 percent don't know.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

JERUSALEM — Three decades after leaving the White House, former President Jimmy Carter still functions inside the trappings of power, cruising through fiercely contested areas of this city on Monday in a 12-car motorcade, with Secret Service agents stationed strategically as he surveyed the view from the Mount of Olives.

But at 88, Mr. Carter, trying to nudge his agenda without an official platform, no longer filters his words for politics or diplomacy. On Monday, he ramped up his years of criticism of Israeli policy by saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lacked the courage of his predecessors and that he had abandoned the two-state solution that has been the accepted framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. And just two weeks before the American election, he was almost as critical of President Obama, saying his administration has shirked the historical role played by the United States in the region.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Netanyahu has decided the one-state option is the one he’s going to pursue,” Mr. Carter said, despite Mr. Netanyahu’s professed commitment to two states, notably in a 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University.

As for Mr. Obama, a fellow Democrat, the former president said, “The U.S. government policy the last two to three years has basically been a rapid withdrawal from any kind of controversy.”

He added: “Every president has been a very powerful factor here in advocating this two-state solution. That is now not apparent.”

Mr. Carter was here with the former prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, on behalf of the Elders, a group of 10 left-leaning éminences grises convened by Nelson Mandela in 2007 that aims to promote human rights and world peace by, according to its Web site, “speaking difficult truths and tackling taboos.” Mr. Carter and Ms. Brundtland met with President Shimon Peres of Israel on Sunday, and all three met with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority on Monday, consulting in between with like-minded Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals. On Wednesday, they are scheduled to see Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi.

A born-again Christian who served a single term as president from 1977 to 1981, Mr. Carter said he has been to Israel and the Palestinian territories about 30 times. He recalled swimming in the Dead Sea on his first visit, in 1973, and noted that there were then about 1,500 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, compared with the 350,000 living there now. And he has long been an outspoken critic of Israeli policy, particularly in his 2007 book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

But Mr. Carter said Monday that the situation is “worse now than it’s ever been for the Palestinians” because of the expanding settlements and lack of prospects for change. Describing himself as “grieved, disgusted and angry,” he said the two-state solution is “in death throes,” which he called “a tragic new development that the world is kind of ignoring.”

Surveys show Palestinians and Israelis overwhelmingly support a two-state solution, but intellectuals on both sides have increasingly been talking about a binational, single state. But models for such a state generally either imagine Israel losing its Jewish character, or ruling over a Palestinian majority in an undemocratic way. Mr. Carter called the one-state option “a catastrophe — not for the Palestinians, for Israel.”

As Ray Dolphin of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs pointed out Jewish homes in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and Hagit Ofran of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch Project described Israel’s tourism development around the Old City, Mr. Carter seemed to have heard it all before. When Ms. Ofran said “there are more powers fighting” against Israel’s policies, he shook his head.

“The United States used to be major obstacle to Israeli expansion — now the United States is quite dormant,” he said. “I don’t really detect the forces. They’re not in Europe. They’re not in the United States. They’re not in the Arab world.”

On Sunday evening, he convened a dinner with Avraham Burg, a former member of Parliament now running a liberal research group; Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the head of a leading Palestinian research group; Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian official in charge of international relations; and Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to Turkey and South Africa.

Mr. Burg said Mr. Carter dominated the three-hour conversation and displayed impeccable knowledge of the intricacies of the situation. Mr. Abdul Hadi said the former president urged the Palestinians to follow through on their bid for statehood at the United Nations — a move the Obama administration opposes — and to reconcile the rift between the Fatah faction, which dominates in the West Bank, and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.

“This is important, to get the Israeli and Palestinian intelligentsia to think out loud and not to carry on the rhetoric and the slogans, to do something,” Mr. Abdul Hadi said. “Call it Carter’s wake-up call in Jerusalem. The question: Is he meeting Netanyahu?”

No. Mr. Carter said the Elders had in the past been turned down for meetings even with members of Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet. When he last spoke with Mr. Netanyahu — Mr. Carter could not remember whether it was around the 1999 funeral of Jordan’s King Hussein or the 1995 memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli prime minister — “he said I had betrayed Israel by giving Egypt the Sinai Desert,” recalled the former president, who arbitrated the 1979 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said the prime minister denied that such a conversation took place. Mr. Regev pointed to Mr. Netanyahu’s 2009 speech calling for two states and said he “has repeatedly expressed his readiness for direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks without any preconditions whatsoever in order to advance that goal.”

“Those who want to see peace advanced should be asking the Palestinian leadership why they continue to boycott the negotiations,” he said in a statement. “The prime minister has consistently initiated confidence-building measures,” he added, citing the reduction of roadblocks, the advancement of funds and the issuance of work permits, among other measures.

But Mr. Carter blamed Mr. Netanyahu for the stalemate.

“I’ve known every prime minister since Golda Meir,” he said, ticking off experiences with Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak. “All the previous prime ministers have been so courageous in their own way. In the past, all committed to the two states.

“It looks to me like a decision has been made,” he added, “to go to the one-state solution but to conceal it from the world.”

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Attorney Sabri Jiryis (L) and Sam Bahour standing on the rooftop of the 105 year
old Saint Elias Church in the Palestinian village of Fassouta which is located in
the western Galilee. The South Lebanon skyline is in the background.

The horrendous reality of the Palestinian communities inside
Israel—in places like Akka, Haifa, Nazareth, Yaffa, and the Negev—is not about
being regulated to sit in the back of the bus; they could only wish for such
blatant racism. Here, the racism is multilayered, ideological, well-camouflaged,
state-sponsored, and non-stop. Anyone who thinks that resolving the Israeli
military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would bring peace to the
region would be well-advised to peel away the veneer of democratic façade, one
that covers an Israeli plan with only one goal in mind: completing the campaign
of ethnically cleansing Palestinians that started with the creation of the
State of Israel.

Last week, on a beautiful fall day, I sat in a friend’s living
room in a village at the northern tip of Israel,
adjacent to the Lebanese border, in the part of Israel
called the Galilee. This is where the Palestinian
citizens of Israel
are concentrated. Five generations of Palestinians were sitting in the room. As
expected in Palestinian society, within no time, politics was the focus of the
discussion. But this political discussion had a different twist from what most of
those following this conflict are accustomed. The issues had to do with the
Palestinian citizens of Israel
and how the Israeli government systematically and structurally discriminates
against them.

Bilateral negotiations between the Palestinians and
Israelis, better known as the infamous Oslo Peace Process, began with a slogan
(and accompanying actions on the ground) of Gaza
and Jericho First. The idea was that the Palestinian Authority, which the Oslo
Accords created, would start by being set up in the Gaza Strip and in the West
Bank city of Jericho, a
sort of pilot phase before subsequently deploying to all of the Palestinian areas
defined in the Accords. The standing joke at the time was that what Israel,
the military occupying power, really meant was Gaza
and Jericho Only!

With 20 years of a never-ending “peace process,” Israeli misdirection
diverted the world’s attention, including the Palestinian leadership’s, away
from the discriminatory workings within Israel
itself. As the parties quibbled over who violated the Oslo Agreement first and
most, Israel
never stopped strangling the Palestinian towns and villages inside it. More
recently, even some of the mainstream, international research outfits, such as
International Crisis Group (ICG), were forced to take note. Their March 2012 report
titled, “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” stated:

“World attention remains fixed
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but a distinct, albeit related, conflict
smoulders within Israel
itself. It might be no less perilous. Jewish-Arab domestic relations have
deteriorated steadily for a decade. More and more, the Jewish majority views
the Palestinian minority as subversive, disloyal and – due to its birth rates –
a demographic threat. Palestinian citizens are politically marginalised,
economically underprivileged, ever more unwilling to accept systemic inequality
and ever more willing to confront the status quo.”

That’s researcher-talk for “A slow and calculated campaign
of displacing an entire population in broad daylight—world, take note.”

As one travels northward in Israel,
a stark reality cannot be ignored. Israel
is empty. Most of the lands which comprise the State of Israel, as it is recognized
worldwide, are empty of any population. The sad irony is that less than one
hour’s drive north of where we were sitting, hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian refugees, who, since 1948, have been prohibited by Israel from
returning to their homes, dwell in squalid refugee camps, waiting for
international law and UN resolutions calling for their return home to be
respected. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, a Palestinian researcher with the Palestine
Land Society, and a refugee himself, has extensively documented this phenomenon
of empty lands in Israel,
lands that Palestinian refugees call home. The undeniable fact is that allowing
Palestinian refugees to return home would disrupt very little on the ground in Israel.
It would, however, threaten the very basis of its existence as an exclusively
Jewish state and create a demographic majority of Palestinians—a normal expectation,
given that they were the majority in 1948 prior to being expelled.

Another startling realization, when traveling around the
Palestinian farming villages in the Galilee, is that the hilltops are dotted
with gated, Jewish Israeli communities and Israeli government-declared nature
reserves, all creating a physical barrier to the natural growth of the
indigenous Palestinian communities. Added to these physical obstructions to
Palestinian development, Israeli law provides for another platform, a legal
one, whereby hundreds of Israeli communities can keep out Palestinians on
cultural grounds. Coming from the occupied territory of the West
Bank, these physical obstacles and legal tools looked to me much
like the illegal, Jewish-only settlements that surround every Palestinian city.
The physical location of both types of these residential colonies is not
random, but rather a sharp demographic weapon to interrupt and stunt the growth
of the Palestinian communities.

While hearing the tribulations of Palestinian communities in
Israel, I was
reminded of another jarring fact: Israel
detains and arrests Palestinians for their thoughts. One of the persons I was
with, a 64-year-old man, was released a few years back after spending two years
without charges in an Israeli prison. On my way home, I stopped in Haifa and,
while speaking to a new business acquaintance there, he reminded me of another
case: Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel and the director
of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, who, like so many
others, is imprisoned in Israeli jails after an unfair trial aimed at striking
fear into an entire minority community in Israel. Also, just as in the areas
under military occupation, Israel
tends an army of collaborators within the Palestinian communities to do their
bidding for them.

I wanted to engage more, but had to head back home to the West
Bank.

Now that I’m a Palestinian ID holder, which means I have West
Bank residency status issued by the Israeli occupation authorities,
I can’t be in Israel
as a tourist. My U.S.
citizenship—my only one—is useless now that I am classified as a West Bank
Palestinian in the Israeli government’s eyes. Israel
is the only place on earth where I can’t be an American! Thus, my Israeli
military-issued permit, which allows me to enter Israel,
restricts my movement so that I have to be back by 10 in the evening to what I
call my cage, also known as the metropolitan area of Ramallah.

What is now clear to me, and wasn’t when I first arrived
here shortly after Oslo, is that
the system of command and control, which oppresses over four million
Palestinians under military occupation, is strikingly similar to the system
which controls over one million Muslim and Christian Palestinians inside Israel.

The Israeli
goal is to erase Palestinian collective memory, limit Palestinian education, squeeze
Palestinian living space, and strangle any serious notion of Palestinian
economic enterprise. But Palestinians are not going anywhere. This was confirmed
when I asked a law student from this Galilaean village where he plans to be in
five years. Without hesitation, he said, “Here, in my village, and not for the
next five years, but for the next 10 and 20 and 100 years.”

After hours of deep discussion in that quiet Palestinian
village, tucked away in the velvet-like green hills of the Galilee,
a Palestinian researcher, who was quiet for most of the time, spoke in a calm, definitive
voice. He said that everything we were discussing, in terms of how much harm Israel
is doing to Palestinians living in Israel
and under military occupation, is true, but in the village, the numbers speak
volumes. Over the past 64 years, since Israel’s
creation, and despite all of its attempts to force the Palestinians off the land,
the population has increased as per official Israeli statistics.As long as the Palestinians exist on this
land, he asserted, their rights are bound to be realized.

All the way home, I could not get out of my mind a new
political slogan that would reveal the extent of the Palestinian tragedy, The
Galilee First. Instead of managing the conflict as if the only contentious
issue is about those of us living under Israeli military occupation, the
international community, and Palestinian leadership as well, should call for
the world to witness the reality of Palestinians inside Israel.
If Israel is
bent on discriminating against one fifth of its own citizens, what should we
expect of it in the occupied territories, areas that are not internationally recognized
as Israel?
Indeed, the next time I’m asked what I think the solution to this conflict is,
my answer will be ready: Let’s start with full equal rights for Palestinians
inside Israel.
In other words, The Galilee First if Israel
is serious about peace and truly desires historic reconciliation with the Palestinians.

- Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business
development consultant from Youngstown, Ohio, living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the
West Bank. He frequently provides independent commentary on Palestine and serves as a policy advisor of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. He is
co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and blogs at www.epalestine.com.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

PC(USA)’s Parsons, others see ‘troubling,consistent pattern of disregard’ by Israel government for U.S. policies

October 5, 2012

Accordingly, we urge an immediate investigation into possible violations by Israel of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act and the U.S. Arms Export Control Act which respectively prohibit assistance to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations and limit the use of U.S. weapons to “internal security” or “legitimate self-defense.”

Sam Bahour - Photo

About Me

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American based in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine and is managing partner of Applied Information Management (AIM), which specializes in business development with a niche focus on start-ups and providing executive counsel.
Bahour was instrumental in the establishment of two publicly traded firms: the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL) and the Arab Palestinian Shopping Center. He is currently an independent director at the Arab Islamic Bank, advisory board member of the Open Society Foundations’ Arab Regional Office, and completed a full term as a Board of Trustees member and treasurer at Birzeit University. In addition to his presidential appointment to serve as a general assembly member of the Palestine Investment Fund, Palestine’s $1B sovereign wealth fund, Bahour serves in various capacities in several community organizations, including co-founder and chairman of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy, board member of Just Vision in New York, board member and policy adviser at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and secretariat member of the Palestine Strategy Group.